


MAXIM, I LOVE YOU

by HATECADILLAC



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Dangan Ronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Drama, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Identity Issues, Internalized Homophobia, Introspection, Ishimaru Kiyotaka as Ishida | Kiyondo, M/M, Sauna, Sharing a Bed, Sleepwalking, Suicidal Thoughts, Teen Romance, Unresolved Romantic Tension, VERY ishida-centric lol, god i love ishida so much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-18
Updated: 2020-05-18
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:07:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24260329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HATECADILLAC/pseuds/HATECADILLAC
Summary: Ishida, sleepwalking as he does, finds himself somewhere both unknown and achingly familiar; the kind of polarization that defines his strange, complicated existence.
Relationships: Ishimaru Kiyotaka/Oowada Mondo
Comments: 21
Kudos: 70





	MAXIM, I LOVE YOU

Ishida wakes, and Taka's infinite sadness burns brightly for a moment in the gap of his consciousness—an acid reflux that has him gasping and clutching the place where his neck meets the rest of his body. 

Only once it passes does he realize he's not in any of the dorms; by now he's used to the compulsion to wander between Owada's room and his own, restless and out of place in both. But no, Ishida wakes up standing, staring loosely down at the strange green shallowness of the bath. He'd gone to bed in Taka's stupid uniform, too tired to change, but most of it was now discarded in favor of things he'd stolen-retrieved from Owada's dorm. A white tank top with arm holes down to his waist, tiger striped boxers repurposed as pajama shorts...an amalgamation such as himself, but at least one comfortable to sleep in. 

The independent parts that make up the sum of his brain churn away at their own processes to determine what happened, and come to the same general conclusion: he'd been sleepwalking again. Like almost everything else, Ishida does it out of some drive that seems to come from beyond the part of him that is _him_ —seems to come from the part of him that is everything else. This energy that so possesses him in the brief spurts he’s awake lingers even as he sleeps, unable to stay still. 

But this is new. Usually he just sticks to the halls of the dorms, blissfully unaware under the red before crashing in Owada’s room once again (or being directed to his own by some fellow light sleeper who runs into him). Now he’s made his way to the bathhouse; Not too far, sure, but it’s still funny to think of the sight of him shambling like a corpse through the ugly fluorescent lights of the main hall. He’d hardly seen anyone that day, missed the breakfast meeting (with no small cramp of unhappiness from what he supposed remained of Taka), and now he makes his appearance in the middle of the night, wearing a dead boy’s clothes and walking with no sight. 

It’s funny, right? It’s really funny!

The laugh delays as it works its way through him, taking a moment to push up past everything else and contort his face mechanically into a grin. It's working. The mad energy that has come to characterize him starts rushing back, replenished by his sleep as he starts to laugh. It's a bold and overpowering sound, an imitation of a crowd by one person as he looks pointedly into the water of the bath, not looking at anything else.

It's dizzying, the dull green space that's taking up most of his vision now, in which he can see the vague and wavering reflection of his borrowed body. It's funny. It's really funny.

Now he's fired up again, blood hot and fidgeting to himself where he stands. _Okay, move._ Ishida has to move. But where? And how? Answering for him, his legs start on a frantic lap around the bath, bare feet hitting damp tile at an irregular pace as he skirts the raised border. Dangerous—breaking a rule—he could slip—Taka is a stitch in his side, overpowered by more laughter. The joy of running—for it _is_ a genuine joy—denies its latent purpose: to distract. To be distracted, to keep looking down at the water as he makes his way around and around, to not look at anything else.

_It's really funny. Don't look at that door._

—

Ishida has the unique privilege of remembering the day that he was born—right in the other room, sprung fully formed from Taka like some Greek god. Gasping out a metaphorical first breath, his hair turned white not from fear, but from a lovely and hateful passion that sunk immediately into his bones and stayed there. There was a chip on his shoulder already. But those bones were not his bones, that hair not his hair, face not his face: he learned that quickly enough in retrospect when he remembered Naegi's vacant look, taking him in, finding nothing familiar. His residence was in the body of another, a friend, making him an unwelcome shadow of a friend.

But he is not Taka, shadow or otherwise. He is himself. Taka was weak; Ishida is strong. Ishida can speak, can shout, can snarl. Ishida burns at the melting point of bad feelings. Ishida was not born, he sprung fully formed from Taka like some Greek god—

_(Anteros—brother of Eros—deity of the reciprocal love—)_

He doesn't feel that strongly anymore, not now that he's acclimated to Taka's body and the changes he thrust upon it. Being Ishida is no longer a confrontation, a triumph, a middle finger. It’s more like completing a puzzle: working off an image, filling in gaps to rebuild it. There is an image of Taka that still lingers, Taka as he was before Owada's death...before _watching_ Owada’s death. Taka could not rebuild this image himself—he couldn't do much of anything. It all stung too profoundly on his own, suffocated by the whiplash of being rewarded and taken from with such fluctuation. He retreated into himself, became unknowable. There was a piece missing from the puzzle. Owada was the piece.

Ishida still grapples roughly with Owada, with exactly how much of him he is — less so than Taka, certainly, due to the lack of a physical link (which is disorienting at times when his frame seems too lean or too short). It’s like being possessed, and maybe it _is_ that, the body coinhabited or taken over by a spirit. A weight was lifted off of him in the very first, chest swelling with confidence and drive, drive to do _SOMETHING!_ , to _FUCKIN’ DO SOMETHIN’, PUNK!!_ Ishida spent the hour after he was born storming around Hope’s Peak, shouting at the top of his lungs and trying to punch holes in the walls. It was _EXHILARATING!!!_

On the occasions when Owada fades out, Ishida feels like he’s been exorcised.

Being Ishida is exhausting sometimes, and sometimes it _hurts_. This is one of those times; he only makes it five or so laps around the bath before he’s winded, bent over himself with his hands on his thighs as he tries to catch his breath. Everything he does seems to take twice as much energy, burning twice as fast—he’s unsustainable. His knees hurt like hell, but not the kind of hurt that comes from running; it’s more like he’s been sitting in one place for hours, stiff and murmuring with complaint rather than screaming. He’s sweating hard, and the air of the bathhouse seems wet and heavy with heat even now in the middle of the night.

Ishida kneels, then sits, before lying on his back on the floor next to the bath and looking up at the ceiling with slow, heavy breaths. The tile’s wet—he can feel it through Owada’s shirt—oh well. Even though it's a little gross, it's nice enough to be lying down, looking up at the obscured ceiling up above, in shadow but for the small halos of light that radiate outwards at measured distances. The grossness of the damp spot is outweighed by the relief of being prone, of staring up into the shadowed ceiling so high above his flushed face, of not looking at anything else. Not looking at anything else...the relief of pointedly staring up, eyes softening their focus, and not turning his head to look at the pink door in the wall to his right.

Ishida is not fucking stupid. He can put two and two together well enough to understand why he just so happened to walk to the bathhouse and not anywhere else, why his stomach seems like its trying to squeeze itself into nothingness, why he feels simultaneously like he’s about to cry and like he’s about to watch someone cry. There is a method to his madness, after all, and with a groan he gives in and rolls on his side to let the bottom of that damn door fill his vision. There’s no point in resisting—he’s so exhausted—easier just to let Taka and Owada wallow in their regrets for a moment. Maybe somehow he’ll be able to shut his brain off, and they can cry blindly for each other and let him sleep right here.

—

Neither of them had really gotten the chance to understand love, but Taka and Owada both understood respect. Respect was a similar two-way street, given and desired in equal measures. It had a definition that was less nebulous, too: _a feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements._

It was respect in his mind that drove Taka to so admire his upperclassmen when he was younger, an explanation for his tendency to study on the lawn after school so he might catch someone in particular on their way home, smiling and laughing. Respect was a damn good excuse for why Owada found it so monumental to have someone ride bitch on his bike, hands curving around waist out of necessity: an act of veneration, a ritual. Nothing less, but also nothing more to try and figure out once he was on his own again.

During their short time together, Taka and Owada grew to respect each other more than either could fully understand.

Ishida knows all of this, but he doesn’t know it as though it were a memory, or anything real. He knows it more like you know your favorite character in a novel or a movie; you become let in on information that already exists somewhere else, generated a long time ago far away from you. Their histories, their fears, their hopes, none of that really happened: all is context for the now, the story that unfolds before you. You are plunged violently, immediately into the now, and you must play catch up to understand the agony all around you, you must have access to what happened before to even begin to grasp this ecstatic, this horrible, this ever-shifting _now_ —

 _(And when you have a favorite character in a novel or movie_ — _when you respect them_ — _don’t they become a part of yourself? Don’t you change small things, the way you talk, the way you hold yourself, to be like them? You think to yourself:_ This is someone I admire...they’re so cool... _and then little by little…)_

The history did not begin where it ended. Strange as it was to believe, knowing them now, at first the two had repelled one another. An attempt on Taka’s part to get to know his classmates, in the only awkward mode he knew how—a misunderstanding when they first really met—

_(Let’s bare our bodies to one another!)_

Words exchanged then, harshly—

_(The fuck’s wrong with you!?)_

And with that the first impression was shot to hell, and had to play catch up. Each so wanted to take up space, was so _used_ to taking up space, that they outgrew each other like two goldfish in a bowl. They butted heads, frequently, publically. The breakfast meetings that Taka had pushed so hard to organize more often than not devolved into the two of them shouting at each other.

Taka and Owada had, on very little evidence, considered themselves diametrically opposed. There was no common ground between them, they had nothing to say to one another, each saw the other as exactly the inverse of what they stood for. Taka had morals, he understood what was right or wrong—he did not use foul language, or intimidate others—he would never break the law—

_(I’m a leader...a real leader!)_

But Owada was a leader, a real leader. No one pushed him around—no one told him what to do, what to say—he worked hard—he was strong—

_(I’m strong!)_

And most importantly of all—

_(I’m not a fuckin’ queer like that Ishimaru guy!)_

—

Ultimately that was the core of it, though Owada would have punched your lights out if you suggested such a thing to his face. He’d had an inkling of how he was oriented before Taka did, before their competition in the sauna that forced everything out into the open. It was another part of the complex that would go on to ruin everything, though perhaps one more acknowledged; in knowing it, and fearing it, Owada could control its presence.

It was off around the gang, obviously—the idea of explaining a thing like that made his stomach tie itself in a knot,

_(Ishida felt it so through time and space)_

and it definitely wouldn’t have done wonders for his already shaky reputation. It was easy enough to play along at hitting on girls—he thought that maybe he just needed to keep working on it, and then once it came naturally to him he’d be able to be normal like the rest of the guys, and there would be no problem at all.

Even at home with Daiya had been out of the question; they’d been through so much shit together, yeah, but this seemed different, seemed too personal. He wanted to think that his brother wouldn’t have freaked out or anything...but there was no way of knowing, and just pushing it down felt way better than even the thought of taking that risk. That left him only the brief times he was alone, truly alone, to even consider easing his guard on his own brain. In his room at night, excused by darkness, he might grant himself the freedom to linger on the sight of a leather jacket falling snugly over broad shoulders, on the experience of one of the other gang members bandaging a busted knee and chewing him out gently under his breath to _not be so fuckin’ stupid next time_. 

It felt _good_ to think about shit like this. It felt really, really _bad_ that it felt good. Owada lived consumed by this back-and-forth, and it tore up his insides like an acid.

And so it became easy to psychoanalyze, to understand his aversion to Taka as more akin to a fear: the fear that Taka was ~~like him.~~ If Taka was ~~like him~~ , then there would be no more use denying it to himself, no more ignoring it or pushing it to the wayside—like a sick foreshadowing of what was to come, Taka’s being ~~like him~~ would be a revelation of his secret, and the revelation would be worse because it would be a self-revelation. He hated Taka at least in part as an excuse to hate himself and not feel like shit about it.

Obviously Taka didn’t know any of this. How could he? Woefully undersocialized, he didn’t think of how his genuine suggestion for a bonding activity might have come off as a little odd

_(a little queer—a synonym—)_

or how it might play exactly into Owada’s own melodrama he was gritting his teeth through. He had agonized over it a little, but eventually accepted what he thought was the truth: Owada hated him, for no real reason. Ok. Whatever. Taka didn’t know. Still doesn’t know.

But Ishida knows, and Ishida knows that he doesn’t know, and it feels like it’s all ripping him in two.

Even now the door to the sauna is demanding his attention with a sudden wave of nausea. Ishida opens his eyes—just noticing he’d closed them—and lets his vision be swallowed up completely by the weird, gross pink of the door’s paint. The gap between the bottom of it and the tile floor is just big enough to catch a glimpse of warm, wooden paneling inside, prompting Ishida to swallow acid hard and quickly put a hand over his mouth. Ishida has actually never been inside the sauna himself, but he knows it like the back of Taka’s hand; if he thinks about it enough, it is as if he can feel the heat coming from inside, feel the sweat starting to bead on his chest and forehead, feel the strange dryness of the hot wood underneath him—

_(or feel Owada just inches away, the sensation of physical closeness craved even now.)_

—

_(Mondo doesn’t know this, but that night in the sauna was the best I spent in this place—and the worst, too.)_

Taka had been _mad_ , that night. Not mad like Ishida is mad—directionless, an approximation of anger—but really truly _mad_ , a proverbial fire lit under his ass. Sure, Owada was mad

 _(Mondo was mad_ — _Taka corrects, sobbing_ — _this is_ my _story)_

Mondo was mad, too; that anger is less accessible to Ishida, the sense of it simply lingering red in his field of vision. The dining room had been altogether too small for the both of them, overcrowded by their yelling, words that hadn’t really meant anything at the time and certainly didn’t mean anything now, all things considered. Mondo wouldn’t make eye contact with him; he was shouting from the top of his lungs, red in the face, _mad_ , and wouldn’t look him in the eye—it pissed him off—!

_(What’s his problem? Why won’t he look at me? Why do I want him to look at me?)_

Naegi had come in, then, and it was only a matter of bad timing that he had gotten involved. He’d looked at the two of them there, from Taka, to Mondo, then back to Taka with such worry, worry to see his friends fighting; Ishida can’t help but feel jealous. When Naegi looks at him there is this strangled expression, like something has to be said, a look devoid of emotion but wallowing in it on the inside. Ishida feeds from emotion, and cannot starve.

Naegi was there, too, as a divider, a distraction—they had called him a witness but this is what they meant. With him there, there was space between their anger, like a lid on a pot boiling over. He was a symbol; anyone could have taken his place, cruel as that might sound. One of the girls, even, which Mondo would have liked, an opportunity to keep up his posturing. Just in case, you know, there was any question of what two guys were doing alone at night, in the sauna. With a witness there was no more question. 

The rules were clear from the very start, and sacred, too, because they were also boundaries. It was to be a simple endurance contest—whoever stayed in the sauna the longest won. _What_ they won was inconsequential, never specified, save for a joke from Mondo that was less funny when Taka repeated it. Afterwards, they would part ways, return to their separate rooms, sleep fuming or celebrating, alone. Whatever this _thing_ was between them, this anger that could not be managed, this _need:_ to defeat, to prove wrong, to _be-better-than_ —it would be flushed out, never again to raise voices or prick tears to be laughed at in the corners of Taka’s eyes. Sweated out, the way a sauna in its conventional use is supposed to do for you. Taka always felt everything _deeply_ ; that remains true even now, if the way he makes Ishida nauseous twenty-four-seven is any indication. But the swirl of everything he’d felt through his bones that night, in the dining hall, or in the bath, seemed felt too deeply for even him to have known before. So there was that impulse, then, to return to what was familiar, to follow rules. With the exception, obviously, of Mondo’s rule:

_“We’re gonna battle with all our clothes on!”_

In retrospect, Ishida wants to groan, throw popcorn at the movie screen of his overcrowded brain. 

When the competition started, they were both so good at keeping it up: trash talking, provoking, showing off. Posturing. Mondo, miraculously, had kept his rule-boundary, fully uniformed and strangled as he alone knew he always was. Taka had stuck to his guns as always and refused, towel clad, and Mondo still would not look at him. He shot daggers instead solidly at the interior side of that fucking door as a viable substitute. They went on well enough this way, performing, witnessed, until so distantly the night chime went off and Naegi left. _Had to leave_ , was how he put it, but really he left. Tried to get them to leave, too, but there was “ _NO (FUCKIN’) WAY!_ ” that was happening, not before someone won or lost—a draw would have made them both inconsolable. So Naegi left them, and then they truly were alone, unwitnessed, unobserved, so it started.

Isn’t there some theory about how you grow fond of something simply by being near it for a while? The idea had come to mind for both of them in passing, though they didn’t know they shared it, either as a dry joke or a brief pathetic swipe at a status-quo that had already been let go of. It _had_ been a while—hours, though there was no telling how many. Any physical indication of time passing, tiredness or hunger or the like, was overshadowed by heat and anger, which overtime fizzled into just so much heat. Their trash talking lost steam as they took it on, inevitably running out of things to say and growing too overheated to generate any new ideas (though neither would have dared admit to such a thing). There was a silence for a moment, in which they both simply breathed in and stretched out with the labor of their exertion...and in which Mondo, for no reason he understood

_(and Ishida understood even less)_

Turned and looked at Taka, head swiveling to the side with the same effortless motion as his chest rose and fell with his heavy breaths. Taka was not looking at him, still trained on the door—it was safe to look. For only a second, he watched the sweat drips along Taka’s forehead and jawline, the same he knew must be forming on his own face, watched the same laboring of his (unexpectedly similar) frame as he panted, down to the fold of his towel at his hip—

_(and realized, in that moment, that there was no real objective reason he hated Taka so much...nothing more than a feeling, a sense, a self-serving projection of something that really had no meaning.)_

That was too much, too much, he had to start talking again—eyes snapping back up to catch Taka turning just then to look at _him_ , he stared forward once more and let his mouth move with more self-defensive vitriol than he could reign in.

_“Hey, hey, Mr. Honor Student…”_

So it picked up again, more vicious than before, like a last wind before the inevitable decline—there was something base and indulgent about it, releasing some shared potent energy neither fully understood the scale of. Taka had expected such a thing, in his idea of who Mondo was then, that kind of coarseness and incessant digging in attempts to get under the skin (even though it worked, and worked _well_ , even if he didn’t know why). He was able to bite back just as hard, surprising himself—

_“You’re barking like a loser...you’re dressed so sloppily…”_

And surprising Mondo even more, that such a stuck-up crybaby like Taka had that much poison to spit. Something had been set off in the both of them, exacerbated with each word shared in a horrible feedback loop. Boundaries started to break, the unspoken line of what could be said-or-not-said being toed closer and closer to:

_“People like you who don’t make any effort are losers right from the start! That’s inexcusable—”_

That was the thing that made Mondo stand suddenly and raise his fist, pulling back like a snake seconds away from striking—but it just hovered there, in anticipation, because Taka flinched. It was a small but deafening action as he blinked hard and his shoulders tensed, Adam's apple betraying the motion of his fearful gulp. Seeing that, a single thought rang out loud and logical over the static that was clouding Mondo’s brain

_(If you hit him, you’re going to be the person you are right now to him forever)_

and it was enough to send his arm wavering pathetically before sitting back down again. Reeling from what felt like a realization (even if he had no clue what it was a realization _of_ , exactly), there was nothing he could do to stop himself from sitting back down and doing something even _more_ humiliating: talking about himself. _To prove the bastard wrong_ , he tried to justify in his mind, and that was true mostly—running a whole gang basically by his damn self sure took some fuckin’ _effort_ , after all. But a smaller and less admirable part of himself _wanted_ to talk about himself; as stupid as it was, he’d scared off just about everyone he’d tried to talk to here already, whether with his voice or his height or just the fact that he was _Mondo Owada, Ultimate fuckin’_ Biker Gang Leader.

_(and it felt stupid to feel bad about it; after all, wasn’t that what it meant to be strong?)_

His only friends were the other Crazy Diamond guys, after all, and they were all on the outside. Though he only recognized it that moment, and Ishida even now shook with the half-coherent weight of it, Taka was the only person who’d pushed back when Mondo pushed first, who’d gotten back up in his face, and so he had to know. Mondo had to _be known_ ; first just about the cool and strong parts, but everything else started to slip out afterwards, following along that strange and nebulous desire to just _be known_.

_(though of course, there were some things that would never surface, not even in a moment like this, as long as he lived—which would turn out to be shorter than he bargained for.)_

And Taka was _floored_ by this. He’d thought—well, he didn’t know _what_ he’d thought of Mondo before this, other than that he was loud and rude and a delinquent. What was he supposed to make of all this? He’d been wrong, which made him feel stupid, and he’d made an assumption, which made him feel guilty. His face was heating up even beyond that still-all encompassing heat of the sauna (though was there even a competition going on anymore?) There was more in common between them than he ever could have imagined, between how they thought, the responsibility they carried, that same weight...something clicked, and Taka found, refreshingly, that he could talk to Mondo as though looking in a mirror, at himself.

_“But you can’t go on like that forever.”_

_(after all, he had always been better at giving than taking, in advice and everything else.)_

The feedback loop, then, took on a different connotation, a softness following their brief moment of venom and harsh words. To hear about Mondo’s life, Taka couldn’t help but talk about his own, too—an action that was thrilling in its newness for him, the ability to speak with someone like that. All at once they understood each other, that somehow they had been two sides of the same coin gone unseen by a haze over the two of them, revealed and giddy as it reflected over and over. They could look at each other, make eye contact, despite everything.

Taka found himself enraptured by this new and real Mondo, the Mondo who loved dogs, who wanted to be a carpenter, who had cried for his sake to hear the hardship he’d gone through

_(the things that Mondo hated about himself)_

In a way he hadn’t felt about someone before, that they could be friends with each other. Almost more like they’d _been_ friends with each other, for who knew how long, but had only just realized it. Yes, this must have been normal, then, for friends—to feel like this. Not like Taka would have known any different. This was the first time he’d spoken to someone like this, so openly, honestly; he admitted to this too, words falling like it was a joy to say them, tearing up not from frustration or anger as he often did but from a _feeling_ too vast and overpowering to be contained in his body for very long. Tearing up, and laughing, together; they stayed like that for a long moment, before Taka at once went tense, then slack, pitching face forward and falling squarely on his face to the sauna’s wooden floor. 

He’d lost their competition, in the end, but there was joy even in losing. Even as the dull shock of pain wormed its way out from his nose, as he could feel and see from the corner of his eye dark blood ebb and flow out from it, he kept smiling, unable to banish the expression from his face. He lay there for a while, flat on his stomach, happy for the first time in his life that he had lost.

_“I can’t do it anymore...I lost…”_

He voiced the fact, for no one but himself, dizzy with delight. Something had changed, now, and wouldn’t ever be the same for him—and thank _god_ for that, thank god.

Mondo stood, concern furrowing his brows—he was flooded by it, even though Taka couldn’t see, which leaves Ishida beached somewhere in the middle. Then he bent at the waist and did something unthinkable: propped one of Taka’s limp and overheated arms over his own shoulder and stood him up, supporting him even as his legs shook like mad. Taka had never learned that kind of touch, only then realizing he’d been starved of it, and yet it already was the most natural and normal thing in the world. He _knew_ howto be touched like this, even never having done it before.

_“I gotta admit you’ve got guts...it’s my loss.”_

So they had both lost, then. That made sense, somehow—even if the competition had ended somewhere in the middle there, it was a satisfying conclusion, and they could move on from that moment before and open the door anxiously outwards into what they now had. The cool air of the bath in comparison lit up Taka’s skin and rejuvenated it, bringing an energy back to his just previously weakened and streamed-out body—everything was coming together, thematically coherent, all the individual pieces lining up like a well-deserved epilogue. For a moment the two of them were wrenched gratefully from place and time, out of context, and all that existed was _this_ place and time, being built in front of their faces by their own two hands.

Same after as before, they couldn’t keep their mouths shut, filling the space with their loud and clashing voices...only now full of laughter and chatter, words bumping clumsily into each other as if they were rushing to catch up and say _everything_ , learn _everything_. Something that had always been so awkward for Taka, something he’d failed at his whole life, came as easy as breathing or studying. Mondo, too, felt released from that sort of past performance, a break from being who he wanted to be and an excuse to be the person he was—the guilt and self-doubting wouldn’t come until later.

Finally, at once, they performed that ritual, the very thing which so long ago (though logically it could only have been a week or two at most) had served to put up a block between them in the first place: bathed together, bared their bodies to one another in the same fashion Taka had proposed with such awkward confidence then. They didn’t plan for it to go that way, but it seemed _right_ on some profound, unshakable level neither of them had the power to ignore or go against. In 20-20 hindsight, Ishida understands that it was meant to be an apology, and a forgiveness. They were reborn, the two of them, the second the water hit their skin, and they sunk down to be submerged completely as long as they could stand it before resurfacing with gasping breaths. They were so close to each other, looking in each other’s eyes, bare and vulnerable, gasping for air in tandem as if once again emerging from the womb.

_(and for a moment there, maybe, hypothetically, if one or the other had leaned or stumbled forward, and their lips had met—well, it would have been okay, considering everything—and they were alone, after all, there was no one to see, other than themselves—)_

Taka did not exactly realize it—just figured, as always, that he was on the verge of ruining this with how incapable he was at making friends, how _weird_ he was, or a synonym for such. Mondo refused to admit it—which worked so well that even Ishida, after everything, can only make muddled sense of the feeling. From his outside perspective, though, Ishida as _Ishida_ (however confused such a concept is), it is the most obvious thing in the world; Taka and Owada are or were the two most blissfully insufferable lovebirds in the universe. Surely someone must have known, if not themselves (not counting Owada’s well-refined technique of deciding not to know). Someone must have _understood_ , caught a subtext to their ‘manly bond’ that went over their own heads. Why, then, did no one tell them? Why did no one break the news? That was the tragedy of it in the end, that they were caught in the space between knowing and not knowing, and by the time they started to know it was too late. They had both lost.

That night they shared Mondo’s bed, and it was the first and last sleepover Taka would ever have; he was caught off guard by that sort of ritual, tense and strange. There _was_ a tension building between them, undeniably, underneath the relief of their friendship, and it creeped up on the both of them before they could identify it—despite everything, they turned away from one another to change. Something just as vague and unplaceable as what was driving them together was making its attempt to push them apart through self-doubt, nowhere near as strong but still biting enough to make them both give pause. Individually, they psyched themselves out, creeping nerves firing under their skin as they lay in bed together, odd and strangled. Maybe they should have spoken, but they didn’t speak—just looked at each other, faces towards each other, looking into each other’s eyes the whole night long as they drifted in and out of sleep. It was impossible to tell what hour of the night it was, other than it must have been late, so late. The time seemed not to pass by hours but by experiences—shifting and permeable, out of touch.

Still longing in a space that was starting to leave the recognizable space of friendship—even best-friendship—they kept looking at each other, wrapped up in their own thoughts, dialogues running in tandem unknown to each other:

_(No one knows this thing about me.)_

_(No one can know.)_

_(Not even my mother or my father—)_

_(Not even the other gang members—)_

_(No one, no one—)_

_(Not even Daiya—)_

_(Not even Mondo.)_

_(Not even Taka.)_

When they woke they woke wrapped up in each other, inevitably, arms and legs knotted together, chests close enough to feel the rise and fall of each tired breath. Their faces lay perhaps not even an inch away, a physical space between some definitive action that was so small as if in parody of its mental equivalent which was so vast. They woke at the same time, too, and just stared at each other, before mutually getting out of the bed they shared and deciding, individually, never to divulge the private realization they had both independently come to.

And then, at the breakfast meeting that next day, they held hands under the table—an action out of sight of anyone else, just for them, an attempt at replicating that enlightenment they’d reached just the night before which already seemed so strange and distant. Already they were strange and distant together, to all the others; their change of heart so drastic they feared, individually and secretly, that someone would see through to the truth of what it really was. So that was the boldest they ever got about it, that private act. 

_(Taka doesn’t know this, but that night in the sauna was the best I spent in this place—and the worst, too.)_

—

Ishida is pain, and he was born from pain, the personification of a cry for help or a moan, unheard, in the dark. He understands that now, but as though he knew it all this time and had realized its weight only in the bath’s bright and unflinching fluorescent lights. He is _in_ pain, too, throbbing through him in steady waves and rendering his breathing sharp and shallow. But he knows that it is Taka’s pain, made physical, possessed by the ghost or memory of Owada’s pain. Maybe that’s all there is, and there _is_ no Ishida at all. Just a coping mechanism, Taka sad and alone, talking to himself. Only now does he feel like he could handle something like that, now that he’s made it here, that he could go on relinquishing his consciousness and becoming the insult to the dead he supposes he has been forever, even if he’d once convinced himself otherwise. Maybe it would be a relief, even, to submit to life as complex. Ishida, if there is an Ishida, is dead by virtue of not-living the way a decision dies when it goes unmade. It doesn’t make sense to him, either.

But at the same time, isn't Ishida love, too? Wasn’t he born from love just the same as he was born from pain? Taka and Owada love each other, in the present tense, and so Ishida was begat from the pain of that love. They sleep together still, and Ishida is the bed they lay in. It keeps him warm and safe, despite everything, and he can feel that warmth like a gift the two of them are so desperately trying to give each other. Taka and Owada love each other, they love each other, and Ishida is the only person alive who knows it, if he is even alive. He is _made_ alive by their love.

_I love myself because Taka and Owada love each other! I hate myself, just as strongly, because of how they hate themselves!_

Ishida is the pain of love, is a love of pain, is a love despite pain that persists forever in the face of it. He is two sides of a coin, the way Taka and Owada were two sides of a coin for so long before realizing, too late, that a divide like that necessitates the presence of a single beautiful and shared body. He lets out a breath and holds it, long as he can before it starts to burn in his chest, and then he breathes back in in the same prolonged motion, on purpose. Ishida exists on purpose. He is _himself_ , fucked-up metaphor that he is, and he can understand that now more than he ever did before. 

So when he rolls off the side of the bath, plunging into the water, it is as though in search of some perverted notion of a return to the womb, cold in the opposite but just as comforting. A rebirth, for himself, for Taka and Owada, the hopes that they might start over and come to know each other again. Ishida imagines, for them, as the water sticks his clothes flush against his skin and sends a stream of bubbles from his nose, what the world they would inhabit together would look like. Living in the house Owada would have built for them to live in, some town or city far from the pain and love this one had thrust upon them, _far_ away from the pain and love of Hope’s Peak...holding each other closer than Ishida could ever enable them to hold each other. Shutting his eyes, he takes that world with him into his dream, still underwater and yet too blissfully asleep to even think of waking up again.

_Escape was the goal; escape from Hope’s Peak, return back into normal life. But that was something for Taka and Owada. Ishida was born in this context, brought about by it and it alone, so what would he do if he escaped? Owada was dead, Taka dead in every way that mattered. He was all that was left of them, even in the strange and roundabout way a thing like that presented itself. What other choice did he have but to die here, too, with them? It would be easy enough...to sleep here, and wake up once more the parts that made up his sum, the odd and incompatible excess gone down the bath’s drain with no struggle. They would wake up in their world, and they would hold and kiss each other like they were meant to do, like their bodies were built to do, and it would be so beautiful…_

—

Ishida wakes up again, in bed, and for a moment it is too dark to tell if it is Taka or Owada’s bed, or if a distinction like that even matters. Fully nude, on top of sheets, damp skin cool and wet hair sticking to his forehead, he sits up with a crack of joints so loud it nearly startles him—he had undressed himself, not like there was anyone alive who would have found poor Taka and done a thing like that for him. It still spins within him, the fact that he spared himself or was spared, that he had in his sleep gotten up out of the water and wandered back. Taka and Owada still want to live, it seems, even if they’re both dead, even if Ishida has no opinion on the matter one way or the other.

He’s crying before he realizes it, burying his face in his hands, chest heaving in silence as he’s overtaken, once more, by a feeling so strong and known to him only by association. He’s stunned by it, observing that motion the way he observes everything: distant from it, listening to a conversation far away between people he has never met. These tears spilling from his tired eyes and onto his pale, waterlogged thighs are so beautiful, and they’re Taka’s tears, and if he can’t understand it he has to live with it.

Caught up in the performance of his weeping, Ishida, at first, fails to notice the note being slipped under his door, the quiet knock that accompanies it so meek for such an intrusion. But like everything else, it gets through and seeds within him, understood in retrospect, and he gets out of bed with a final rubbing of his eyes to discover what’s in store for him now.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [those eggs aren't dippy](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27667169) by [rottingboy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rottingboy/pseuds/rottingboy)




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